Amazon Betting on Prefabs

Alexa products come up first on Amazon’s website. There’s a reason. Jeff Bezos, Amazon wizard, wants Alexa products to own the smart home space.

To help reach that goal, Bezos set up The Alexa Fund to focus on products that extend the boundaries of voice technology into every day lives.

The Alexa Fund enables Amazon and the Alexa Echo to acquire companies like Scout smart home security, Ring smart doorbells and Sutro smart chemical controls for swimming pools. The Alexa Fund enables partnerships with home builders like Lennar Homes to ensure that Alexa enabled smart locks, door bells, thermostats and lighting are and will be standard features in all Lennar homes.

The Alexa Fund most recently enabled a stake in Plant Prehab to ensure that all Alexa enabled products are embedded in all Plant Prehab’s single-family and multifamily prefabricated units. Already such Plant Prehab homes are in California and Utah..

Based in Rialto, CA, Plant Prehab, newly spun off from Living Homes, aims to use automation to build homes 50% faster and for less cost (10-25%) using sustainable construction processes.

According to Technavio, a leading global technology research company, the prefabricated home industry is expected to grow 6% worldwide by 2022. Already, 42% of new home construction in the Americas is prefabricated, 84% of all detached housing in Sweden is prefabricated and 25% of new homes in Japan are prefabricated.

Combine this prefabricated home growth prediction with Zion Market Research’s prediction that the smart home market is expected to grow into a $53B industry by 2022 and Alexa may sooner than later be ubiquitous globally.

Plant Prehab partners with industry leading architects including Ray Kappe, Kieran Timberlake and Yves Behar. (Behar designed the 3-D printed home in France featured here a few months ago.)